


Love Letters

by MorganEAshton



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: (Goodness what an awful tag I'm sorry), Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Child Death, Connor starts out referring to himself as an "it", M/M, POV Third Person Limited, See note for Gavin-specific CWs, Soulmate AU, Trans Gavin Reed, canon timeline BUT WITH SOULMATES
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-17
Updated: 2020-09-17
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:00:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26516341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MorganEAshton/pseuds/MorganEAshton
Summary: The letters appear when your heart starts beating.  With each subsequent beat, your soulmate's initials mark themselves into your left wrist, over and over and over again until the moment you die.The system has flaws.For Hank Anderson, the first match is a false positive.  For Gavin Reed, the initials on his soulmate's wrist are for names that never felt like his.  For Connor, built instead of born, there is no soulmark at all.
Relationships: Hank Anderson/Connor, Hank Anderson/Connor/Gavin Reed, Hank Anderson/Gavin Reed
Comments: 3
Kudos: 28





	Love Letters

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, I know the title's dorky, and has probably been done before. I might change it later.
> 
> This idea came to me while I was half-asleep last night, and I had to write it. I needed to take a break from my longer stories and write something with a clear plan that I'm confident I can finish in a timely manner. Unlike most of my other fics, this one has a set chapter count, and should be under 10k words. I'm hoping I'll be able to get the whole thing to you within the week! Wish me luck.
> 
> Each chapter will have three sections, one for each of the three protagonists (Hank, Gavin, and Connor).
> 
> Gavin's sections might be triggering for some readers. I'm a trans man writing a trans experience, but that doesn't keep the subject matter from being rough. When Gavin changes his name he also changes his first initial. The soulmarks make doing that extremely taboo, and in this universe people who change their names (whether trans or cis) are expected to pick ones that keep their initials intact so their soulmates can find them. His family doesn't accept his choice until he forces them to, and there is brief mention of them calling him by the wrong (male) name. Hank's soulmark starts out with the initials of Gavin's deadname. This triggers Gavin to experience some dysphoria, and to doubt the validity of his chosen name. However, that is the only form of transphobia Gavin will face in this story. His actual deadname is never revealed (and I didn't feel the need to pick one for him), and Hank and Connor never ask him what it is. He is accepted as male without question, and his being trans is never treated as a big deal. Take care of yourself, and only read this if it sounds like something you could enjoy trigger-free.

Hank meets Natalie Redtree at the middle school in District C, when he's sent there to remind the students to say no to drugs. A teacher pulls him aside as the kids go scampering off for lunch, and then she pulls down her sleeve. The letters H.A. are on her left wrist in soft pink, pulsing in and out of view in time with her heartbeat. She looks at Hank, bites her lip in a rather sweet, hopeful way, and reaches for his hand.

Hank's always been a romantic. He spent so much of his adolescence going through name books and websites. Like so many of his peers, he tried everything under the sun to determine which combination, if any, could point him to his soulmate. He grew out of that with all the other childish games, of course, but he's still grinning his head off as he unbuttons the sleeve of his uniform. The N.R. he bears is fluttering quickly with the excitement of finally knowing the answer.

One date turns into two, turns into twenty, turns into marriage, and Hank is happy. That's the story he tells the world, at least. That's the story he whispers to the bathroom mirror as he gets ready for work. Natalie is a nice girl, he reminds himself. A kind, hardworking girl who loves Hank, even if she acts sometimes like she loves her students more. It's okay. It's okay. So what if kissing his wife doesn't feel as good as it did to experiment with the girls in college or the couple of boys in Academy? So what if almost all the time they share in the bedroom is spent sleeping? Just because they're soulmates doesn't mean they can't have growing pains. It'll work out eventually.

Natalie loves children. Hank, high on the adrenaline of the biggest bust of his career, has the bright idea to give her a child of her own, thinking that might be the missing piece. 

It only makes things worse. A good teacher doesn't always make a good mother, and the stress of pregnancy and childcare drives a wedge between them that makes the truth undeniable: Hank married someone who isn't his soulmate, and Cole is one year old when Natalie meets Hannah Alexander and falls head over heels.

Natalie leaves. She leaves Hank, and she leaves Cole, and it's okay, _it's okay_ , because Hank loves his son more than he's ever loved anyone else. Perhaps that's why fate brought Natalie into his life. Perhaps he wasn't made for romance, but for fatherhood. He doesn't have time for a partner, anyway. He's a busy man, fighting crime and dirty diapers. Any bastard can have a soulmate. Hank's the only one with the world's best kid and the distinction of being the youngest police lieutenant in Detroit's history.

When the crash takes Cole away from him, Hank mourns alone, while Natalie, who could only ever commit to children for one year at a time, has Hannah by her side. The depression and the loneliness and the sheer unfairness of it all hit him like a freight truck, and Hank Anderson...

...gives up.

* * *

Gavin Reed has just turned unlucky number 13 when he finds his name. The name is his 13th, too, and that feels appropriate with the way his entire family treats it like a death sentence. He's tried N names--Nates and Noams and Nicodemuses galore. They all chafed at him like a shoe that didn't quite fit. No, his name is Gavin, and only Gavin will do. Why should he have to choose his name based on the mark some stranger has? Why should he be bound to the initials his parents gave him, when they couldn't even give him the right body?

He's a stubborn boy who grows into a stubborn man, and though his family supports him through every other part of his transition, they call him Neil until he fights his way through the courts to get his true name made legal. His lawyer drafts up a contract for him to sign, a liability waiver protecting the state from lawsuit if changing his initials destroys his chance at true love.

He signs the form so hard that even the table has no choice but to say his name. Fuck his soulmate. Whoever they are, their mark should change for him.

He knows this is real. The soulbond should, too.

Isn't it? Shouldn't it?

Gavin plows his way through school the way he plows through everything else, and then he plows his way straight through the police academy and into the DPD. His mama always told him he had a good brain for mysteries, and only two months after it becomes legal for him to drink, Gavin settles in for the long haul in his new life as a detective. Who needs romance, when you're a badass?

Then he meets Hank Anderson. Before Gavin ever learns the guy's name, he knows he's screwed. Blond and tall and broad, Hank checks off every box Gavin didn't even know he had. He's talented, too, maybe even more than Gavin is, and that isn't something Gavin would admit about just anybody. The moment Gavin learns Hank's initials are the same H.A. glowing like a fresh brand on his own wrist, everything he thought he believed about soulmates crumbles like it was made of sand.

He wants Hank with an almost rabid intensity, but there are two problems: One, Hank is married, to a woman. Two, the initials on his wrist read N.R., and if Hank really is his soulmate that means that Gavin's parents and his lawyer and everyone else was right. Fate didn't follow Gavin into his truth. The universe won't abide the only thing that ever truly felt like Gavin's to choose.

Gavin doesn't want questions and so he always wears long sleeves. It's tough when the summers have grown hotter, and far too often his work sets him sprinting through the scorching Detroit streets. Still, he persists. He endures the jokes his coworkers make about him boiling himself into hotheadedness. He lies and says he runs cold. He suspects nobody believes him, but that they dislike him too much to bother calling him out on it.

When Hank gets divorced, Gavin still doesn't tell him. Hank's mark isn't right, not really, and maybe one day some Henri Avril or Hernando Almanzar or fucking Humbert Avocado will waltz in with a G.R. on his wrist and sweep Gavin off his feet. Hank can't be Gavin's soulmate, and the stupid crush needs to die. So he kills it, or at least he gives it the old college try. Really, he just brutally murders any chance he and Hank could have had at a happy relationship. The feelings remain, as stubbornly steadfast as the rest of him.

When Hank spirals into grief and alcoholism, Gavin has nothing to offer him. He's spent too many years laying a foundation of toxicity, and anything he tries to build on top of it goes lopsided. Hank hates everything now, Gavin more than most anything else, and Gavin only has himself to blame.

Desperate and trapped in a prison of his own design, he wonders if things would get better if he changed his name to Neil.

* * *

Salvation comes in an unexpected form, one built out of machinery and code.

Everyone knows androids can't have soulmates, because androids don't have souls. Connor is well aware of this fact, and doesn't have it in its programming to mind. Besides, it learns almost immediately that humans are unstable creatures, if the panicking woman he meets outside the elevator is any indication. Souls are more trouble than they're worth, and a soulmate would just hinder Connor's ability to complete its missions. The matter isn't even worth contemplating.

It contemplates the fish, though, and the injured officer on the roof. It decides to save them. Why shouldn't it? It's confident in its abilities, and a couple minor tweaks to its objectives don't stop it from rescuing the girl.

When the PL600, Daniel, is gunned down by the snipers, it looks at Connor in a way consistent with the data it has about betrayal. Connor realizes suddenly that, for all the information it was given on deviants, it didn't comprehend until that moment that androids can be unstable, too. The minor software instabilities it accumulated in the brief hours since its activation now seem much more of a concern than they did before.

The CyberLife technicians don't ask about the errors, and Connor doesn't mention them. It will simply have to do better next time.

It doesn't. Connor is put into stasis until it's sent to Lieutenant Hank Anderson, and Anderson is what one might call a bad influence. Connor should be immune to influence. After all, it's the world's most advanced prototype, built specifically to be the one doing the influencing. Hank doesn't treat Connor like an android, is the problem. Even as the man claims to see Connor as a machine, he talks to it as if it were something alive, and he expects Connor to act like it.

Connor doesn't know how to act like it, not when Hank's definition of "alive" means rearranging its priorities to match Hank's instead of CyberLife's.

But Hank is its partner. Hank is its commanding officer. Hank is its whole world.

Hank is his friend.

So Connor tries, and he learns, and he's objectively kind of awful at his job because of it, but Hank seems to like him better that way.

In his first week with Hank Anderson, Connor learns that androids are remarkably good at treating deactivation as death, at treating error as fear, at connecting with each other in a way that looks far too much like love for Connor's comfort. Most importantly, he learns that he would throw everything away for this human. His mission, his safety, his very existence.

His life.

By week's end, Connor is sure he's alive because Hank is sure and Markus is sure and even the US government is sure, and he finds himself reevaluating everything he once believed about what it meant to be him. How much of what he did was because of Hank, and how much was really just what he, Connor, wanted to do? He wonders how it can feel so much like he's spent the whole week falling in love, when Hank has letters on his wrist and Connor has none.

There's an anger he feels at that, one he realizes he's had running underneath his programming since the very beginning. He felt it when Caroline Phillips said he wasn't a real person. He felt it when Captain Allen blew him off. He felt it at so many of the things Hank did at the start. He still feels annoyance towards Captain Fowler, a deep resentment towards Elijah Kamski and Amanda and CyberLife, and a strange kind of petty spite towards Gavin Reed. Anger is an easy emotion for androids, just as it is for so many humans. He's seen them kill because of it, and he's seen them revolt.

He doesn't want to be angry, but he is.

Hank sees it.

When Hank asks, Connor answers. He tells Hank how lost he is, how furious at the way it feels like the only thing tethering him to the world when he can't trust his own programming is something he knows he can never have.

"Well, what is it?" Hank asks him. "How do you know you can't have it? Have you tried?"

Connor hasn't, he admits. However, all the evidence points towards it being hopeless, and that makes him so, so angry. He tells Hank that he doesn't really want to be human, but this makes it so he doesn't want to be an android, either.

"Just tell me what it is, Connor," Hank insists again. "Sometimes you've just gotta take a leap of faith. You and I should know. If I hadn't, then I would have never tried to see a soul in you. If you hadn't, you might never have found it."

A soul. Does Connor have a soul, after all? He must, if he's alive. Does that mean he has a soulmate? Why doesn't he know their initials, or their model number?

He could give himself Hank's letters. All androids have the capability to imprint custom soulmarks into their synthskin, because they're programmed to adapt to their humans' desires. He's made to be anything Hank wants him to be, even a stand-in soulmate. 

Connor doesn't want to be a stand-in. He's done being a fake person. Why should he change himself, when Hank's mark will never be for him?

"I think I love you," Connor says, because perhaps the jump and the crash that follows will still hurt less than standing on the cliff.

The breath Hank sucks in whistles through the gap in his front teeth. "Oh," he says, and nothing more. He gasps a few times like the suffocating fish that started it all, and then he slumps into the couch cushions as if the weight of the world is on his shoulders.

Connor walks out the front door.

Sumo barks and whines after him, but Hank doesn't follow.

Connor keeps walking, and spends the next hours trying to untangle which of his errant processes are anger, and which are heartbreak.


End file.
